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New But Not

hello all, my name is stan darnell. i am new to this site, but not new to melting metal. i weld for the interstate highway sign corporation. mostly aluminum, but i have spent alot of years in the quarries working with high pressure, and structural steel. my hobbies are to take scrap and make something good. my last project was i took scrap aluminum and made arkansas' only aluminum pedestrian bridge, then donated it to a charter school close to the house. i would like to show pics, but i don't know how. maybe someone would tell me how to post a few pics.

Welcome

Always glad to welcome new blood to the board, would really like to see some of your projects. To add pics to your post , scroll down to the manage attachments button, in the new window click on the browse button and find the pis you want then click upload and walaa you're posting pics. Dave

If necessity is the Mother of Invention, I must be the Father of Desperation!

other projects are stuff to see if i could, like a grill from the tank out of a hot water heater, or a gate that weighs 600 pounds and swings on one post, things like that. the hard part is it mostly is scrap metal. no new metal was purchased fo any projects, except for the gate, i had to buy some amazing hinges...lol

Welcome to the board, Stan! Your pictures are awesome! I love your aluminum bridge (I also love it when anybody posts anything that Dave will respond to since we get to see him sitting next to his race car with a hottie!--pay attn to his signature for more information).

A few questions: what kind of equipment are you using to weld aluminum? What brands, what setups, what wire, etc etc etc?

i have a miller legend ae/ad 200le engine drive, an arc one inverter cc machine, an xmt 304 with xr-a push-pull feeder with a 30 foot xr edge gun for aluminum, and also a millermatic 350p for just about everything else. my wife was not happy about the price of that one...lol
mainly i use 0.35 wire 5356 alloy for aluminum because i dont post heat treat. if i get a request for that then i will use 4043 alloy. although the 4043 will not anodize to the same color as the parent metal. it all depends...

Arc One Inverter?

I'm not familiar with Arc One inverters...what are they? The 350p sounds like an awesome machine....I'm jealous!! (of course, I'm not jealous of the fact that you have to come face to face with your wife's anger...) Hee Hee

I love Miller's 304 welders, but my Champion 10,000 won't power it and the money for a wire-feed system (as opposed to a spool gun) just isn't in my cards at the moment...